Tales of A Mother's Vengeance, preferably Based On Fact, are mere grist for the TV-movie-of-the-week mill. What lifts this one a head -- not shoulders, too -- above the general run is the time it takes with, and genuine concern it shows for, the characters' feelings. But then John Schlesinger, throughout his lengthy directing career, has devoted many more hours of time to human-heart stuff (Darling, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, etc. ) than to sweat-and-blood stuff (Marathon Man, The Believers, Pacific Heights). His staging of the crime itself -- based on fiction, by the way, a novel by Erika Holzer -- makes imaginative and horror-heightening use of the cellular-phone phenomenon. And numerous scenes are flavorfully seasoned with observant and offbeat details. And there's an intriguing plot turn concerning a subgroup of Death Wish-type vigilantes within a legitimate violent-crime-victims' support group. The heroine perhaps loses a few points with the audience after she inadvertently uncovers an FBI sting operation to ferret out these vigilantes: couldn't she have clued them in at the same time she was opting out? Not to worry, though. The movie, troubled hardly at all about the moral and spiritual ramifications of revenge, and only moderately about the legal ramifications, doesn't back off on the promise of Bible-sanctioned retribution in its title. Sally Field, Ed Harris, Kiefer Sutherland, Joe Mantegna. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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